ESSENTIALS OF SAFETY BLOG 8/14
Thinking about our listening improves our ability to listen.
This is the eighth of a dozen or so blogs covering the Essentials of Safety that I talked about in the first blog of this series. We have covered an introduction – which we called Essentials of Safety, Understands their ‘Why’, Chooses and displays their attitude, Adopts a growth mindset – including a learning mindset, Has a high level of understanding and curiosity about how work is actually done, Understands their own and others’ expectations and Understands the Limitations and use of Situational Awareness.
The other blogs in the series are:
- Plans work using risk intelligence.
- Controls risk.
- Applies a non-directive coaching style to interactions.
- Has a resilient performance approach to systems development.
- Adopts an authentic leadership approach when leading others.
- Bonus – The oscillations of safety in modern, complex workplaces.
Listens Generously
My belief is that listening is the most important skill a leader can possess. The ability to listen and to be seen as a generous listener can set a leader apart from others. I have often heard people using a leader’s listening ability as a surrogate for their ability as a leader.
Generous listening is an art. Listening is a skill. Listening is not always easy. However, listening is one of those things that can change the way you are seen by others and can directly impact your leadership effectiveness. How you listen also plays a big part in how we interpret what we hear. This can make a big impact on the effectiveness of task assignment or when we are sharing mental models and talking about our expectations and risk controls. How we think about our listening can significantly impact and improve our ability to listen. This idea is called meta-listening – that which lies beyond listening. The ‘how’ of listening if you will.
This meta-listening – listening to how we listen – improves our ability to listen. Meta-listening is a practice that we can adopt as a reflective approach to help us be more effective and impactful listeners. We also need to help other people understand how they listen and how they can keep improving their listening.
Our listening is an access to understanding. The more effectively we listen, the more we get to understand the world around us. Our listening creates our reality – the better we listen, the more we get a sense of the mental models of those around us, which feeds our reality. Listening is a tool by which we filter sounds and noises and how we select what to absorb into our knowledge base and what to ignore as background noise. Because it is a filter, it does not always filter in the way we anticipate it to. This leads, as we discussed in the previous section on situational awareness, to inattentional deafness, which can mean we hear but do not respond to what we hear. We heard but we did not listen.
Generous listening is much more than simply being quiet whilst others talk – it is all about focus and curiosity. Generous listening may also be described as active listening, or unselfish listening, or perhaps even disinterested listening. It is all about focussing your being on what is being said. Generous listening is not getting ready to respond. It is not thinking about something else like what’s for dinner. Nor is it thinking ‘I have heard all this before’. It is about listening not only with your ears, but with your eyes, your body, and your mind. ‘Listening to understand’ is another way of describing it. It is a super-important skill to have as a leader, and as an individual generally.
If you ‘get’ why generous listening is such an important tool, then we should explore how to get better at it. A good way to improve our listening as a leader is to always allow others to speak first. This has the result of encouraging others to express their views and opinions first and not simply respond to what you may have to say as their leader. Letting others speak first may result, if you are listening generously, in improving the quality of what it is that you subsequently say. Leaders speaking last shows that they care, that they are interested, and that they find what others have to say is important.
I came across a great way to encourage generous listening through a great consultancy called JMJ Associates here in Perth. They were helping me and my team develop our coaching skills. The idea they shared with us was about having a listening coach. A listening coach’s job is to listen to our listening. It works best during meetings that involve conversations and interactions rather than in a presentation style meeting. You need to first find a volunteer to be the listening coach. The role of the listening coach is to listen to the people and to give feedback on how effectively the participants listened during the meeting. A listening coach looks for a number of things:
- The degree to which people are building on others’ words, or go off on a tangent.
- The amount of time people give others who want to say something.
- The body language of the listener, including eye contact, body position, and focus.
- The number and intent of interruptions.
- Generally, whether the team members are listening generously or stingily.
In summary, listening is a skill that can be learnt and practised. My call to action is for each of you, the reader, to carry out a little post-mortem on your listening at least three times a day for the next week. During each post-mortem, think about the conversations you have just had and ask yourself how you listened and explore whether you could do anything differently next time to have listened more generously. Generous listening is all about listening with the desire to really understand what is being said.
An Example
Just having a listening coach changed the way our leadership team operated during its monthly meetings. We had one of the General Managers play a role, in addition to simply being a member of the team, of being the listening coach. I noticed that after the team all had a go at the role and got used to the fact that their listening was being listened to by one of their peers, team members seemed to pause before talking, attempted to build on each other’s topics. This was a big departure from what we used to do, which often was to give the floor to the person who interrupted most or who was the loudest. Over a few months, the flavour of our meetings changed and I believe we all learnt how to listen better as a result.
Key Takeaway: Thinking about our listening improves our ability to listen.